twangypearl the elastic girl

some things of very little consequence

No bon mots have been forthcoming from JB, unfortunately, though he is going through an entertaining/annoying phase [delete as applicable] of Playing the Martyr.

I'm just a fooool who loooves you! he proclaims, at the drop of a hat, in an industrial strength Kerry accent.
Also: SADNESS, said in robotic manner, in response to anything that doesn't particularly please him.

Sorry there's no bread left, JB, someone might say.
SADNESS.

It looks like rain.
SADNESS.

Working late again, JB?
I'm just a fooool who loooves you!

Marge Simpson-like: Hrmmmmmmm.
------------------

My mother is 70 as of yesterday. What do you get someone who says she wants nothing, and needs nothing and maybe even genuinely wants nothing?

Dare I say: something?
Something, it has to be! To give nothing is a metaphysical impossibility, isn't it? Not to mention a bit of a social faux-pas.
It's quite a conundrum, as you can see.

*(If metaphysical is the thing I mean, clever readers?)
------------------

I have it on good authority (JB's colleague's wife/partner told me) that cats don't meow at each other, they only meow at people. So, in fact, according to the good authority, meowing is a cat's attempt to speak Human. Isn't that charming and clever of them? Like tourists in Spain, trying to communicate with the taxi-drivers, only instead of asking for a hotel, el aeropuerto or the station, what do you think they want to share with us? We should know, we're the ones with the big, fancy, supposedly evolved brains. (Whereas theirs are the size of a bean).

Maybe this:

 
Insights from people who know these things are welcome.

I wish we had a cat or dog, but the JB seems to have mixed up the Mean Parent Handbook with the Good Husband Handbook and keeps saying: We'll see.

SADNESS.

(Har).

*the cool

The clan met at my parents' house yesterday, and I borrowed a jigsaw from Brother to make a wooden box for a show. He showed me its functions and buttons while Spike (4.5 years of age) quizzed us with urgent, unanswerable questions, like:

But what shapes can you really make with it?
Any shape you like, Spike.
But where are the shapes?
...
Brother strongly recommended safety goggles (he has accidentally embedded various shards and pieces of DIY shrapnel in his eyes, over the years) for sawing. I don't have any goggles, but oh! now I think of it, I do have some prescription swimming goggles, which I bought recently in an effort not to miss anything in the pool. I can wear those. I'll be like Bono, but with a jigsaw instead of a microphone and without the fans.

 
(note haughty killer-like expression).

Yesterday evening, after that, we had a meeting in the exhibition "space". (It's always a space, with artists, as you probably know). The meeting was populated with a lot of desperately cool, twenty-something artists in a freezing warehouse in a dodgy part of the inner-city. All the exhibiting artists sat there - a beardy one, some long-haired girls, some pierced ones and one performance artist with the most fantastic facepaint (I didn't dare ask if she had just come from a performance or if this was her usual get-up, if so, very impressed) - as the one of the cool ones explained how the show is going to work. I sat there quietly, glad no one knew The Archers were on my mp3 player.

One of the Young People complained about the cold in there (it's true, there was that bone-chilling concrete dampness) and another one pulled up his top, to show us his vest, and said:
One euro in Guineys! (an inexpensive, nearby clothing/bric-a-brac shop, kind of a Dublin institution).
 
And they all laughed inordinately. I smiled benevolently to show I was friendly. Inside I was thinking, middle-agedly:
Yes, thermal vests. They are not really all that funny, they keep older people (like me) nice and warm.

It was exciting, in a way being twenty-something. But the effort! The endless grooming to appear casually tousled, the fake ennui, the desperate trying to appear experienced!

I prefer being older, on the whole. I think I've been waiting all my life to be middle-aged. And now I am! (Hurray! What an achievement.)

Which was your favourite/least favourite life-era, so far, I'd like to know?

{*oops forgot to title. }

ask me no questions

Episode 1, last week, in the Torture Chamber
As part of my "recovery", Ms Spangles, my physio, advised me to play ball with my "kids".

Hrmm, where are these kids of whom you speak, Spangly-eyed one?

She's a nice young woman. But what is this assumption that I am marriedwithchildren?
I could be gay/single/part of a harem with children/cats/donkeys/nothing, for all she knows.
I could have fertility issues, Spangles!
It was an opportunity to do a little awareness-raising, in a way. I could have answered with the stunningly obvious:
Not everyone has children, you know!
Or
We haven't been able to have them.

Cue: long pause? toe-curling embarrassment? learning moment?

We'll never know, because I just nodded dumbly. (I was delirious with relief, because I don't have to do back to physio for a month! HURRAY. Then I have to go back to see an Ortho-surgeon, who's going to tell me if I need an operation. But that's A WHOLE MONTH away! and no torture inbetween!)

Episode 2, last night, the doorbell rings.
Goody, I think, pushing myself off the sofa, it's L and/or A, my friends, the sisters, who are fans of the Drop-In.
But no.
It was two clean young men called Elder C*rey and Elder M*ore. They're from the "Knighted States", and want to come in for ten minutes.

Oh, quick, brain, think of a lie. A lie, brain, a lie!

I'm - eh - making the dinner!

Well, we'll have to run with that, brain. Unoriginal but plausible, I suppose.

They press a leaflet into my hands. They're on about The Family. Actually, they are proclaiming to the world some things we've heard before, some fairly obvious things and some things that are, at best, a matter of opinion.

Do I have a family?

Opportunity to stick it to them with a nice, loud, robotic:

No. We have fertility problems.

Except I didn't want to tell them. It's just too personal and sensitive a thing to blurt out like that.
So I went with:
We just got married.

Which was a lie, and a dopey lie, and why do I even care what these people think? Yes, I wanted them to go away and ask our neighbours instead, but really what WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME, THAT I CAN'T JUST BE HONEST?

Yeah. Since early childhood, I have been brainwashed to be nice (at the expense of honesty, clearly) and I just can't break out of it.

 

If anyone has got any good answers to the family question, I'd love to hear them.

Your less-than-frank,
Twangy

Show and Tell

Hello to all, from a blustery Ireland.
You are most welcome.
 __________________________________

In the park recently, in this autumnal weather, with the leaves turning overhead, I came across a couple of parents with a small boy, perched on a bike with stabilizers on it.

There was something so endearing about this family unit, so unassuming, as they pushed their boy off on his first solo ride.

His delighted cry, full of the surprise of discovery:

I can do it!

made my young/old heart fill with longing.

 
Have a look at Mel's Circle Time post to see all the Show and Tell posts.

entertaining

JB's friend and colleague plus wife/partner (depends who you ask) were to come over on Saturday for dinner.  In the midst of the mad panic culinary preparations, I rang my mother who is a well-known good "cooker" (as the kids say) to ask her how to prepare some chestnuts quickly, in time for dinner. (JB had come home with uncooked chestnuts in their shells.)

She responded:

Where did you get the chestnuts? You didn't.. did you find them in the park?

Ma. I do know you can't give people conkers for dinner.

 

the black night of the soul

Sleeping.

It should be easy, shouldn't it? But it seems to have slipped my mind how to pull it off. I can fall asleep easily enough, but come 4am (not a good time to think about Life, kids) I am half-awake, and then totally awake, and then thrashing around like a dying fish on the pier. It's not so much fact that it's tiring, as it's depressing, the kind of things you think about at that time of night.
Know what I mean?

Last weekend at my parents', on my squeaky old nun's bed, (and no Kerryman to keep me company), marked a bit of a low-point. Mad thoughts circled my mad little head, including (but not limited to):

• dark thoughts
• mournful thoughts (about a pony I knew that died about 20 years ago, funnily enough)
• ludicrous thoughts
• "brilliant" demented ideas
• Thoughts about my post-menopausal role model, Jane (Surely she doesn't ever feel like this?)
• hungry thoughts
• bored thoughts
• frustrated thoughts

And so on. I'm annoying myself with my early morning angst.

Anyway. I got that off my chest.
Here endeth the moaning.

Twangy

state of play

Menopause symptoms=0

(Unless you count the rush of blood to the head I got when JB had the NERVE to ask me to get him some mayonnaise and milk the other day and then, after 10 mins, ADD green apples to that list as if he'd never heard of rush hour traffic and parking. This was even as he kindly was rushing home to let me in, when I found I'd locked myself out. Yes, that could have been sheer crankiness, but oh look! here's the zola.dex, let me hide behind that.)
So:

Menopause symptoms=1

All is well. In fact, things are wonderfully quiet internally. You don't realise how much of a tide of hormones your mood rides on until it stops, everything is still, you are unchained from the beast and you become calm and powerful and Jane Fonda-in-that-l'Oreal-ad-like.
(Well, one can but hope).

Here's another thing:

I've been painting the front door, and feeling urges to bake, and knit.
So help me, I think I'm nesting.

confusion

It is thus the life of a freelancer:

1. the work comes all at once, so you go demented trying to get it all done, working like a maniac and becoming a husk of your real self,
2. then you twiddle your thumbs for weeks, and take to making bets with yourself on the raindrops as they run down the window.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2

It's a law of nature. So it did not surprise when two jobs flooded in, (to paraphrase Terry Wogan), while my brain is still all fogged up and duuuuull after the anesthetic. Everything seems far far away, minute and incomprehensible. Thinking is like trying to thread a tiny needle with huge woolly-mittened giant's hands.

One was just a look and feel for a website. Quite easy and functional, and the other is an animated e-card for - let's see, what is it they call themselves? Oh yes, str@tegic online communic@tions and marketing consult@nts.* HA HA HA. (Mirthless guffawing). These are the people that out-source everything at the lowest possible price, and pass it all off as their work. A deal was struck, in any case, and off I went to work. Then the Business Development Manager (again, HA HA HA) in charge of the job rang me yesterday morning, to reverse out of the deal. Suddenly my price was huge and unaffordable, and she battled me down another 40%, whining how much "work they put our way" (veiled threat) and how it was "a lovely little job" for me.

I'd GRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrr, but, honestly, I haven't the energy.

Now I am waiting for them to get back to me on my storyboards, while I flop-brainedly try to think about things. Like how I should be ringing the ChildDr, to re-hear what she said after the operation. You would think a surgeon would know how pointless it is to explain anything to someone who has just come to after an anaesthetic. But no. All I remember is:

.. mpfff... a month or so, to let it settle down.. lullll.. and then a couple of months.. your own..mhmm.. zolasomething.. puhfffump..

Which could mean anything. The nurse told me to get a prescription for zola.dex, which, if the price (e100) and security involved is anything to go by, must be fairly potent stuff. The chemist told me I'd need to get it every month, and then I made the dire mistake of looking it up on the internet, which confounded my giant's mitts even more, since it makes all kind of references to nasty side-effects, and the fact it dampens your hormones so it can be used for some kinds of breast cancer and if you continue to menstruate while on it, you should inform your doctor.

What was that, again?

... 

[trying to think]

...

Darkened room might be the thing now.

Till later

Twangy

* Oops, just occurred to me now that I should perhaps disguise that.

before and after

Laparoscopy Day on Thursday.
It really wasn't so bad, just like May said. (I mean, if I had a choice between a frozen shoulder and a lap, it's a bit of a toss-up, but I'd have to go for the lap).

The worst part was being left (fasting! on an empty stomach! that is, hungry! and thirsty! I think the point is made!) to wait in a series of windowless rooms for hours, being interrupted every once in a while for a blood test or to fill in a form.

So far I haven't been given any before and after images, so I have improvised:

Or, you know, something like that.

some distraction, but not as we know it